StoreVirtual Storage
1748019 Members
4730 Online
108757 Solutions
New Discussion

Re: Support for VSA Appliance

 
adolbec
Advisor

Support for VSA Appliance

Hi,

I am trying to get support through the ITRC for the LeftHand VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) 8.5 using HP care packs that we purchased. I have not however been able to have the registered care packs show up as valid in ITRC to link to my user profile. I suspect that unless there is a hardware serial number, the ITRC tool does not know how to link the care pack ID; in this case the VSA is a software product with no serial number.

I would like to know if anyone else that is running the VSA was able to register their care packs and use them through this web site. Any feedback regarding is appreciated; it has been a "kafkaesque" experience of going through the vendor and too many phone calls to HP to get this fixed.

The issue that I want support for is when building a VM using Windows Server 2003, it will often crash the manager of the VSA node owning the cluster IP before the setup portion of Windows that ask to accept the EULA. Failover is work but the crashed manager cannot only be brought back online by resetting the VSA VM, not an elegant solution and could cause data replication errors.

Thanks.

Alain
7 REPLIES 7
Troja
New Member

Re: Support for VSA Appliance

I had the same problem with VSA and I happened to know that they are supported under the Service Agreement ID and not the Serial number of the VSA.

RonsDavis
Frequent Advisor

Re: Support for VSA Appliance

adolbec
Advisor

Re: Support for VSA Appliance

Thanks,

 

Since this was posted a year ago; I was able since then to get support for the VSA which was done under a SAID. It took however a year to get HP to fix the nigthmare of having the purchased support packs added to our SAID; someone unable to give solutions it up a year ago and they seemed to pass the problem forward to the next one in line.

 

Sadly, the original problem has persisted and we have since migrated to vSphere 4.1 U1 and SANiQ 9.0 with all the latest patches. It seems more stable now but we are still stress testing to ensure that it performs OK before production deployment.

 

Alain

Bart_Heungens
Honored Contributor

Re: Support for VSA Appliance

Hi,

 

Keep us posted about the outcome of the tests... I have done several installations like this and I must say that it is stable... Never had big problems with it... My VSA demo/test setup at home is running for more than 2 years now with my volume going offline... And I upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 to 8.5 to 9.0...

 

Which tests are you running for performance testing?

 

 

Kr,

Bart

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If my post was useful, clik on my KUDOS! "White Star" !
adolbec
Advisor

Re: Support for VSA Appliance

Hi,

 

No. I am still testing the new updates that I have applied to the ESXs and VSAs but a the release notes of patch 20030-00.20110525_P20030.patch contains the following paragraph: Prevents SAN/iQ process restart due to invalid SCSI command from any iSCSI initiator. Our failures occured using SANiQ 9.0 and vSphere 4.0 U2; we have migrated to vSphere 4.1 and the problems do not occur as often. We are still testing with that SANiQ patch and hope that it will fix the issue. Getting this resolve by opening tickets with VMware and HP got me nowhere; the error could be reproduced only within a time period and not at a specific command.

 

Alain

adolbec
Advisor

Re: Support for VSA Appliance

Hi,

 

Our deployment scenario is to migrate VMs located on one box to a vSphere HA cluster using VSAs on 2 ESX boxes. Because the time window for migration is tight and that we have to repeat this 16 times, the procedure is heavily automated and tries to get things done as fast as possible. Because of constraints, we dump the reference VMs into OVFs and then push them back on the HA cluster. Our initial problem was that the VSAs would fail during that time; trying to push only one OVF did not ensure that they would not fail. Once the VMs were copied over, doing any type of file copy between the VMs would make the VSA fail again. Sure they would recover but VSAs would reboot, resync and the VMs would either hang or crash.

 

Alain

RonsDavis
Frequent Advisor

Re: Support for VSA Appliance

I somehow missed this page of the VMware docs when I first set things up. You may want to check it out.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-4-esx-vcenter/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.config_iscsi.doc_41/esx_san_config/c_multipathing_checklist_iscsi.html

 

Set the following Advanced Settings for the ESX/ESXi host:

Set Disk.UseLunReset to 1

Set Disk.UseDeviceReset to 0

UseDeviceReset is set to 1 by default. Seems like asking the SAN to reset could have stability issues. In any case, this seems to be best practice. I only wish it was mentioned in HP's docs.